I caught up with Gever Tulley from The Tinkering School at The Education Project in Bahrain, where we were exploring just how we can set up more student-led learning starting from the teacher- or school plan-led processes most schools are stuck in at the moment.

Gever is most well known for his two TED Talks: Five Dangerous Things For Kids and Teaching Life Lessons Through Tinkering. Concepts discussed at a $6,000 a ticket conference are one thing.

What can regular schools learn from his experiences? My quick video with Gever provides some starter points (also available on Vimeo). The key learning from Tinkering School that can be shared with regular schools can be summed up in one statement:

Do less teaching and let students to make more responsibiulty for their education.

The very same mantra was echoed two weeks later in South Africa at the Microsoft Innovative Education Forum by a high school student on the main stage. But, how do we make this move in regular schools? Gever thinks there are three good starting points:

1. Classroom sessions can be self-directed
   Start small, with projects that are discovery-based, such as taking apart an existing device, exploring it.
2. Get students used to Design Thinking
   It's hard to come up with projects - use some design thinking processes so that students get better, over time, at discovering really interesting problems for which they an create solutions.
3. Provide protection
   Let kids do their projects, providing some safety nets so that when they fail that failure is supported. Students should be able to take up the pieces and have another go at it, without suffering 'social harm' from their initial failures.

If you want to explore some more ideas around the processes involved in Design Thinking for learning, I'd be delighted for you to join my session (this session room opens one hour before the talk) Tuesday 16 November 6am GMT, at the Global Education Conference. Register online now.

This is one of my favourite moments in the film, The Social Network, that has been remixed as a beautifully produced Kinetic Typography project, in Adobe After Effects, set against the dialogue from the film.

While we're thinking about attention, how often do schools and teachers assume the attention of youngsters, of parents, of our colleagues? My gut feel: nearly all the time.

• We assume that learners want to learn because they chose subjects.
• We assume that learners will want to learn because we like the way we do something.
• We assume parents care about their child's education.
• We assume that our colleagues want to learn how to do their jobs better/differently.
• We assume that adults know how to learn on their own.
• We assume that chuldren don't know how to learn on their own.
• ...

We need to work consistently at gaining attention, retaining attention and turning that attention into value, much in the same way as a tech startup like Facebook would do (check out Dave McClure's busy but genius presentation on attention and metrics if you want to delve more into how). I'm fairly convinced that somewhere in these tech startup metrics are the assessment tools for the new forms of learning that are emerging, but fighting against assessment structures of old that don't fit anymore.

And in using new metrics to measure success, we can engage in new learning with more confidence, new learning that is almost certainly more likely to get the attention of those around us.

I'm grateful for a constructive formative feedback that took place on this blog and led to the incredibly talented Angel, who made it, changing some minor errors to bring even more impact back to its message.

I'm a huge fan of harnessing ingredients of video games to make learning and working more enjoyable, more motivating (for newbies to this notion:

• mega-post on ideas for games-based learning
• 101 other posts on gaming
• 600+ bookmarks of cool video games and games-based learning stuff.)

Tom Chatfield's seven key video game takeaways are incredibly useful for those redesigning curricula (or their classroom practice) who want to tap into the power of video games. My colleague Derek is always at pains to point out that "good teachers use good tools at the right time", but I still meet folk who miss that, and still feel that a lesson without games-based learning can't be as exciting as those with it. Tom notes in particular the potential in using gamer progress bars as indicators of academic and personal progress. He cites the University of Indiana as one of the cutting edge institutions working in this way.

That said, though, I'm sure when even I was at primary school we had a class chart that we filled with shiny stars every time we progressed in our learning or worked particularly well. Was my Year 1 teacher Mrs O'Hare inventing game mechanics in 1982 without knowing it?

Much in the same way as we can learn from how social networks operate in order to. say, make our own virtual learning environments work better, without the need to feel we need to harness Facebook for learning, I'd say that there are seven gems in this talk that show how we can harness games mechanics for learning from tomorrow morning, without feeling the need to learn the practicalities of bringing in Xboxes, PlayStations and Wiis to the classroom. One thing - to get what these mechanics are, it still helps if you've experienced them first hand by actually, erm, playing a game. Something for your Christmas holiday homework, perhaps?

I'm delighted to announce that Kindle users have another blog they can add to their reading shelf: this week edublogs hit the Amazon Kindle store in glorious greyscale, free for two weeks and then charged at just $1.99, or £1, a month. Amazon claim 70% of the revenue. I'm really not doing this for the dosh as much as for the excitement of playing with other spaces in which people might read and reflect.

If you're into reading on planes, trains, automobiles or Starbucks for all things work, learning or design, then please: fill your boots.

We often talk about how important it is for organisations to be agile and to knit learning into the fabric of daily life, and then produce large, unwieldy processes and technologies for making this happen. I'll be presenting, provoking and setting participants off on a 100 hour journey to revolutionise the way their organisations learn, the way THEY learn, in my session at Learning Technologies 2011, January 26th (tag: #LT11uk).

We'll take a look at how organisations which already are nimble, creative and dedicated to learning are doing this effectively and see what we can learn from them.

Most of the companies and tech start-ups that we admire for their speed to market and smart solutions to real problems see learning as a crucial part of their DNA. Even if the return on investment of time, energy and opportunity cost comes months and years later, if at all, learning is at the core of every great new idea.

I'm going to draw on my experience with large corporations, small start-ups and the education sector, examining what can happen when learning ceases to be something that’s done to you and becomes something you live every working day.

• Learning is not about training courses, nor is it measured in in-service days.
• What are the working processes that involve learning as a key part of creative work?
• What can we learn from the world's most creative and learning-centred companies?
• What next steps can you take to transform learning from add-on to core?
• The myth of the digital native and why learning fast isn’t just a young person’s game

If you have your own stories about your own organisations, however small, large, nimble or unwieldy, please feel free to tell them here and I can send delegates to your site to explore your story more.

Pic from Grant

The world of education has adopted many approaches to creative thinking over the years. But how do those working in the creative industries approach ideation, development and implementation of fresh, new thinking? Using experiences gained in the last four years working within the digital media industries of television, mobile, gaming and the web, Ewan will share how these might be adapted to enhance existing and well-understood structures for learning. GlobalEdCon, Curriculum Track

Depending on your timezone, I hope you can join me on the evening of November 15th (East Coast US), or at some point on the 16th, to ask the difficult questions and prod our collective thinking on how creativity, at the heart of it, is a process, something that can be nurtured and grown. You can register to attend now.

My background is as a French and German high school teacher, but in the past four years have been more and more involved in the creation, nurturing and investment in startup tech companies, film and TV productions. Working alongside these people, most of whom we'd consider 'creative' if we met them at a dinner party, I realised that much of what makes them succeed is a process, of finding great problems that haven't been tackled, spotting tangents and similarities with other problems, and then coming up with ingenious ways to solve them, or relate those stories to the wider world. Above all, they almost see creativity as a numbers game: produce, produce, produce and see what sticks.

These are just some of the issues I'd like to tackle in an educational context, with examples from around the world of how educators and their students have met creativity in a 'non-schooling' way, harnessing lessons from the world of the creative industries. I hope you can join me!

My pic: a Marco Torres iPhone art original

Peter Clausen, Chairman of the School Board at Ordrup in Gentofte, Denmark, a parent in the school design process, describes the multiple-space school. This place is the Seven Spaces of School Design embodied.

It's designed around the fact that students can find out facts on their own, and that teachers' best role is as guide. It is totally centred around the individual, "where teachers address the students as individuals and not as a mass." The building contrives against any such pedagogical attempt.

There are nooks and crannies everywhere, real secret spaces for doing some quiet "absorption" away from the crowd:

Raised platforms are there for blue sky thinking, there are participative wells in which students can sit and discuss:

This school really is based around the premise that we cannot have differentiated teaching without differentiated rooms. I really like the more secret spaces, right, that are reminiscent of a cosy personal homework space in a child's bedroom, rather than a classroom for the masses.

From Jeff Lackney's super School Design Studio blog:

The design, created by Bosch and Fjord, is based in three concepts, ‘peace & absorption’, ‘discussion & cooperation’ and ’security & presence’, that will separate the individual areas in distinct functions and create new rooms for learning. By separating the activities and creating varied rooms space is created for dissimilarity in both teaching and play where the learning situation will be optimized.

Take five minutes out to watch the video and, if you're keen to discuss how school design could be the one technology we're not spending enough time looking at, join in a live webchat with myself and Ian Fordham, Deputy Director of the British Council for School Environments, and co-founder of the Centre for School Design in London, on just the topic.

Sign up in advance for the webchat and join us later this week!

This is one of my favourite moments in the film, The Social Network, that has been remixed as a beautifully produced piece of Prezi, filmed, and set against the dialogue from the film. It's let down by an apostrophe that doesn't belong and a lack of dictionary or spellcheck use, infuriating since the rest of it is rather clever.

Update: a corrected version and the backstory published now on this blog.

While we're thinking about attention, how often do schools and teachers assume the attention of youngsters, of parents, of our colleagues? My gut feel: nearly all the time.

• We assume that learners want to learn because they chose subjects.
• We assume that learners will want to learn because we like the way we do something.
• We assume parents care about their child's education.
• We assume that our colleagues want to learn how to do their jobs better/differently.
• We assume that adults know how to learn on their own.
• We assume that chuldren don't know how to learn on their own.
• ...

We need to work consistently at gaining attention, retaining attention and turning that attention into value, much in the same way as a tech startup like Facebook would do (check out Dave McClure's busy but genius presentation on attention and metrics if you want to delve more into how). I'm fairly convinced that somewhere in these tech startup metrics are the assessment tools for the new forms of learning that are emerging, but fighting against assessment structures of old that don't fit anymore.

And in using new metrics to measure success, we can engage in new learning with more confidence, new learning that is almost certainly more likely to get the attention of those around us.

I'm delighted to see some great interest in my latest Huffington Post, the inspiring story of Moliehe Sekese of Lesotho who has in the past year become a globally acclaimed educator for her work harnessing technology, despite not having had electricity in her school until last month.

The video included in the post would make an interesting stimulus for discussion with students, just at the time when they're gearing up to ask Santa Claus for the latest tech tools, or with teachers as budgets get clamped down and technology becomes harder to resource. If you do use it with either group, let me know how it goes. You can use ZamZar.com to grab the video onto a USB stick at home if YouTube is blocked in your school, or try the Vimeo version of Moliehe's discussion with me.

Read more of my thoughts on the Huffington Post.

Success with digital media for museums, education and cultural organisations isn't about scrambling to sign up to the latest fads, those teasmades of technology, and more about attitudes of organisations and the individuals within them. What are the handles we can grab hold of to begin or better develop our journeys into digital media use in the world of exhibition, performances or engagement of new audiences?

A couple of weeks ago I opened the Digital Futures conference, part of a project exploring how social media interfaces with museums, galleries and other cultural heritage organisations, funded by the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and a partnership between the University of Edinburgh, the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland, National Museums Scotland and the National Galleries of Scotland.

The presentation is now up on Slideshare, and above.

It tries to make a few points, some more successfully than others, no doubt. Key amongst them:

• how to institutions do better what is now so easy for everyman to do?
• is there anything to be learned from the world of startups where coming up with a compelling problem that needs solved?
• what are the problems museums manage to solve? Do they need to think in that way at all?
• what potential is there for cultural organisations to open themselves up to new audiences by tackling the same content and ideas in alternative ways and on different platforms?

I've returned from an exhilarating week in South Africa with Microsoft's Innovative Education Forum showcasing hundreds of fascinating teachers and schools from across the world. The passion of the township kids in the video above sums up the passion and hospitality we were shown, and the hardest work their educators put in to bring joy and learning to them every day.

But most of those teaching in the Western world won't know or care about students cracking cancer cells through vector diagrams in India, the five Arab states that pooled their learning to create a new understanding (and scooped the main award) or the inspirational learning happening in a country where 40% of people live below the poverty line, despite it being one of the world's principal diamond exporters.

I say this based on a personal, unscientific and flawed set of stats gleaned from this site, but one I feel compelled to share. And it was in discussion with Vicki Davis, also with me in South Africa, that we both felt the impact of something outside the control of most classroom teachers and young people: time zones.

Both of us realised quickly that no-one was reading the posts we had started to share from South Africa (my South Africa insights and videos have started here with more to follow; Vicki's thoughts and videos are here).

We were posting the minute we had discovered a new tale, at anything between 10am and 5pm South African time, or 8am-3pm GMT. It was only after one day of seeing no-one was reading her posts, compared to normal, that Vicki started to repost and set new blog entries to post around midnight, to catch the US East Coast's sweet spot. The result? People started to read and watch the videos there, and the viewing spread across to the US West Coast. The same effect was visible on my own blog (and is visible whenever I post too early in the day here in Scotland).

Vicki, I hope she won't mind me saying, was perturbed by such a "rookie error" of posting outside her normal time zones, but I don't think it's that rookie at all. When we're working with young people and they publish their work there is a definite thrill in pressing that publish button and seeing it hit the web now. There is much less thrill in pressing the "Pubish on..." button and seeing it published six hours later so that an American audience can catch it and, with their retweet button, decide whether a thought from outside their timezone is spreadable or not.

And in that, you have the main reason for which I, at least, feel conversations in education have become more parochial than global in the past two years. The subject matter is often the same, but the information and experiences feeding into the conversations feel remarkably segmented by time zone. The loudest conversations at the moment are those about a documentary most of the world don't care about on a local level (and which isn't showing in most of the world's cinemas):

Why is this so? My stats would suggest it's the Twitterification of thought-creation and thought-leading.

Twitterfication - the fast food of education thinking

Twitter has, for most folk, become their aggregator of choice. No longer do blog posts have a half-life of 24 hours, happily resting in your Google Reader until you launch it in the morning (your morning). Instead, your blog post has to hit a sweet spot where the maximum number of connectors and spreaders are awake, at their machine and ready to press "Retweet". That means hitting "Publish" at a time convenient to the mass of educators on the East Coast US, with a half-life of minutes before it is lost in the stream of other thoughts, resources and locker-room banter about baseball.

The conversations have also disappeared from most of the blogs that I, at least, read from outside the US and Canada. They're maybe happening on Twitter, but are now dislocated from their origins, impossible to trace back, and even more impregnable to those coming in 24 hours late.

So, is the media literacy lesson here that we need to teach children the world over that, to make their point they have to make it at East Coast time? Or is the media literacy point here that educators and decision-makers Stateside mustn't down all their slow-food style aggregators just yet, and make a point of reading things published outside the hours of 9am-8pm East Coast?

(And, yes, I've written a provocative post at 10:39am GMT - let's see who can prove me wrong ;-) See video of the kids dancing over on my Flickr page, or below. Catch up on all my videos from schools in South Africa by subscribing to my YouTube channel)

The way we design new schools, and alter our existing spaces, is absolutely core to how we are able to harness learning technology and introduce new thinking around learning. How high is this on the agenda of education leaders around you? And do you want to learn more?

November 11th I will be co-hosting a live webchat with Ian Fordham, Deputy Director of the British Council for School Environments, and co-founder of the Centre for School Design in London, as part of the GETideas.org series. It coincides with the Building Better Schools Forum in London. You're welcome to join us live (check your time zone), and we'll make sure to post the discussion as soon as possible afterwards. Sign-up has already started.

Ian has written a great piece on the GETideas Thought Leaders site:

"...Education policy in Britain has new influences--Charter and Knowledge is Power Programme (KIPP) Schools in the U.S. and Parent Promoted Schools in Sweden--and new models of schooling Academies and Free Schools. As with most countries, the education system is also under ever more pressure to deliver better outcomes on a much reduced budget. Yet despite a more for less environment, we must not retreat into old ways of thinking. Educators must be agile, incubators of innovation and constantly find ways of pushing the system forward."

My own post looks in a more practical way at how we can adapt and rebuild spaces, often at low or no-cost, to enable us to better harness the different technologies and learning activities we are now able to undertake, that were not available even five or ten years ago.

Have a read if you can, and sign up for the live web chat with Ian and me. We'd be delighted to hear about your stories, too, or your thoughts on what's not gone quite right in your own learning spaces. If you have a story you'd like us to help set up on the night for you, just leave a comment here.

The picture, above, is of St Cyprian's school library, Cape Town, South Africa. See more, and hear from their Head Teacher on how school design inspires creativity throughout her school.

John West-Burnham ended the Partners in Excellence Worldwide Innovative Education Forum with a set of conversations. What would your conversations be around these questions?


Are we just about Improvement or are we truly trying to move to transformation in learning?
Are we becoming immune to improvement, in that there's a limit to how much we can approve? If that's the case then what we really need is innovation that transforms where we are, that moves what we're doing into a new space where we can further improve.

"We cannot restructure a structure that is splintered at its roots. Adding wings to caterpillars does not create butterflies - it creates awkward and dysfunctional caterpillars. Butterflies are creating through transformation." (McLuhan, 1995)

But why move off into new ground? Is it a given that change is good, that where we have improved to is not good enough? We innovate because opportunity, well-being success, learning, inclusion and excellence are not available to all.

It comes with its challenges. When I was introducing a totally project-based, product-based curriculum in my French classroom in 2002, to when I propose it to teachers all over the world now, the loaded response is: "That's great, really engaging, but at the end of the day we've got to pass exams." The implication is that different = worse. If we've managed to get 80% of students (or 99%) succeeding with these, splintered methods then how could any change improve on that?


What is the reason for our change and evolving projects? What is its Moral Purpose?
Equality and equity of provision is a fusion that leads us to true social justice. Any strategy focusing on innovation has to promote social justice to be long-term sustainability.

"The high quality and performance of Finland's education system cannot be divorced from the clarity, characteristics of, and broad consensus about the country's broader social vision. There is compelling clarity about and commitment to inclusive, equitable, and innovative social values beyond as well as within the education system." (Pont et al 2008:80)

And what future is it leading us to? What future are we creating?
If you were to ask students what their criteria of success were for the schooling process they would almost all say "fairness". They have a strong sense of justice, of social justice even. If you ask teachers, they'll use the word "consistency". Leaders have to translate policy, words, into practice. They have to tell stories that capture imagination and provide a guiding light for everyone that hears and uses those stories - these stories are what management consultants call 'vision'.

Allowing people just to dream about what they would like as a future for learning is hugely powerful. Giving permission to believe the unbelievable can create a path which people can end up working towards. Building scenarios, pictures of a preferred joint future are vital in helping paint a target around the arrow.

This process is vital - we need a moral destination for our work to make the journey to its achievement possible, and easier. What is it we're trying to do, where does it lead us, why are we taking this journey and why are we going to that destination?


What trust networks have we been able to gather, and how are we going to use them?

"We don't come fully former into the world. We learn how to think, how to walk, how to speak, how to behave, indeed how to be human from other human beings. We need other human beings in order to be human. We are made for togetherness… to exist in a tender network of interdependence. That is how you have ubuntu - you care, you are hospitable, you're gentle, you're compassionate and concerned."
Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

"We-Think emerges when diverse groups of independent individuals collaborate effectively. It is not group-think - submersion in a homogeneous, unthinking mass. Crowds and mobs are as stupid as they are wise. It all depends on how the individual members combine participation and collaboration, diversity, and shared values, independence of thought and community."
Charles Leadbeater.

"That leaves us with just two main sets of factors behind Easter [Island]'s collapse: human environmental impacts, especially deforestation… and the political, social and religious factors behind the impacts… competition between clans and chiefs driving the erection of bigger statues requiring more wood, rope and food.
Jared Diamond

One of the challenges is the extent to which we are going to sustain innovation through sharing. How do we build communities of learning for students, moving schools from places of learning to places of communities. Professional generosity is one of the most powerful means of raising the whole educational game. Part of this, in a virtual sense, is to do with the defaults of systems: all too often the virtual learning environment is set to default sharing with just the class or the school, and not the world. But collaborating with a school 6000 miles away is probably easier and more common than collaborating with the school just down the road - how many secondaries / high schools regularly collaborate, whole school, with another neighbouring high school.


Trust?

"When trust is high, the dividend you receive is like a performance multiplier… In a company, high trust materially improves communication, collaboration, execution, innovation… In your personal life, high trust significantly improves your excitement, energy, passion, creativity and joy in your relationships…"
Stephen Covey

If you want me, as a teacher, to really let hog of my habituated practice, to work in different ways, then I've got to trust you.

Children in schools go through all phases of trusting within just one school day. When you're a 12 year old boy you live in a control culture ("In by 8pm or else"). By 16 there's some delegation and negotiation ("How about 11pm? Hmmm, how about 10pm?"). By 18 you're legally empowered to do what you want ("What time might we see you"). As a 32 year old you are bound by family but not  ("Who are you?").


Is what we're doing a vocation or just a job?

"When people are in their Element, they connect with something fundamental to their sense of identity, purpose and well-being. Being there provides a sense of self-revelation, of defining who they really are and what they are meant to be doing with their lives."
Ken Robinson

When faced with 350 Head Teachers deemed by a national accountability agency as "Outstanding", John asked "Why are you outstanding?" Two thirds responded: "A sense of calling."


And when we face a huge range of pressure, where are our reservoirs of hope?

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without words
And never stops… at all.
   Emily Dickinson

Long-term sustainable innovation, leadership and creativity depends on a sense of hope. The most creative and innovative heroes we have all seemed to have this deep well of hope.

"The patterns are simple, but followed together, they make for a whole that is wider than the sum of its parts. Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; freqneutn coffee houses and other liquid networks; follow the links, let others build...
Steven Johnson

The connection that we aspire to make is shared by all educators: the neural pathway. The child and the family connecting and interdependent. The community connecting. Then get connectivity between communities.

Microsoft Partners in Excellence's Stuart Ball, presenting on creativity and innovation, reminds us with the Elevator Experiment that even though you might be innovating today, it's all too easy to get sucked back in to the mould everyone else has been conforming to all along. What tactics do you have to stop yourself being turned?

When schools talk about "innovation labs" or "creativity centres", it's normally a sign that the mavericks have been sent off to their own corner so as not to get in the way of the serious learning going on in the rest of the establishment. Not so in Sue Redelinghuys' school.

Sue heads up Cape Town's St Cyprian's school, an independent school for girls in the city, that's just become on of Microsoft's global pathfinder schools. Innovation in pedagogy and school building is constant - the building and rebuilding doesn't stop on this hillside patch of learning in the shadow of Table Mountain.

The 'burbs have grown around the school in the hundreds of years it's been there, originally as a homestead and, when the farms moved out to the countryside, as a school. The result is a school that's hemmed in on all sides, presenting a constant struggle to the school as it rebuilds and renovates its older buildings while trying not to disrupt the learning of the students on what is, relatively speaking, a cramped campus.

This means that as new buildings are built or old ones renovated, they somewhat reflect the pedagogical push of that moment. Injecting the creativity one might see in the art and music classrooms at the bottom of the hill into the learning that takes place elsewhere in the school has resulted in the recent completion of a "creativity centre", but its style and student-centred thinking has already infected other parts of the school in small, meaningful ways.

St Cyprian's feels like it's worked out how to hothouse creativity and innovation in physical space, without sidelining those working in more traditional areas of the school. In my video, above, Head of School Sue Redelinghuys explains how.

The library area feels like the hub of the school and really capitalises on many of those spaces of learning I've tried to mark out in the sand:

• Secret spaces abound, with soft, personal reading areas scattered under stairwells and up in the attic space, away from the prying eyes of adults.
  
  
  
  
  
• Group spaces, such as the three self-enclosed discussion hubs, remind us of Roman baths or fora, where students can talk without disturbing those around them - electricity points are available, as is wifi and laptops for loan. The Head of Technology at the school feels it's only a matter of time that some of these students, admittedly better off than most of their counterparts elsewhere in the country, start using the internet-enabled smartphones they have, and will be getting more of this Christmas.
  
  
  
  
• Participation is encouraged through shared communal space, where work is put on show next to the spaces where students can hang out. The steps to the attic are more reminiscent of an Italian marketplace, where young people hang out and share stories, than a library where young folk are expected to belt up and be quiet. The nursery, as you'd expect, is nothing but participation space, outdoors for the nine months of good weather.
  
  
  
  
  
• Watching spaces are celebrated, including the inclusion of a small outdoor amphitheatre.
  
  
  
  
  
• All the senses are included - the consistent smell of lavender around the school is genuinely relaxing. If we planted more of it I wonder what the effect would be on some of our more challenging students.

See more photos from St Cyprian's on Flickr, and the video of its Head on creative spaces and creativity in learning on YouTube.

Late last week I had my first blog post appear on the Huffington Post, the world's most popular blog (though it's Ed section is significantly weaker than its celeb news, I imagine).

It was a riff on a piece I'd previously written up here, pointing out that if ever there was a point in public service spending history to take the time out to consider alternative solutions to the problems we face, it was now.

A forensic focus on growth, with a population that can break boundaries and innovate, does not come from harnessing traditional values of "cut back, focus on getting to the month's end intact". It comes from innovative policy-making first and foremost, with innovation flowing from the rest of us accordingly:

If I said that the worst solutions for the challenges you're facing might just be the best way out of a tight spot, would you believe me? If I suggested that one terrible idea could save a U.S. school district up to $25 million a year -- cutting an education budget and maybe even increasing teacher numbers -- would you be more interested?

As nations around the world seek to save money in their education budgets -- the U.K. seems an exception to the rule with its $8 billion increase in education, it's only budget increase at all -- we might wonder whether creative flair in decision making might be more effective at saving money than the budget holder's red pen.

When you ask a room of teachers or policymakers to come up with their "best" solutions to a problem you often tend to get great ideas, but not always the best ones. They can be contrived versions of management speak and almost always involve some self-censorship from the team: people don't offer anything up unless they feel, explicitly or subconsciously, that it will get buy-in from the rest of the committee or that favored butcher of creativity, the stakeholders. People's "best ideas" for saving money generally involve generous doses of "chop this" and "cut back on that".

At a time when education budgets have never been smaller, and are only going to get even more so, the kind of thinking that defaults to the "old ways" of doing things -- expensive committees, organizations, meetings, 'experts' -- just won't cut it any more. Stanford's Tina Seelig suggested another route to me that has already saved education departments millions this month.

Ask people for their "worst" solutions to a problem and people tend not to hold back at all -- laughs are had and the terrible ideas flow. And while the initial suggestions might feel stupid, pointless or ridiculous to the originating team members, these awful ideas can take on a spectacular new lease of life in the hands of another, unrelated group.

By insisting on a "yes and" approach, rather than a "yes but" approach, a fresh set of eyes can turn these "worst" ideas into the ones that will save money, improve service or make people happier in the workplace.

I've tried this approach on several senior education groups now from Bahrain to the Scottish Borders, each time with huge success. With one school district, seeking creative ways to maintain the quality of their services for millions of pounds less, the results were simply brilliant.

• Reduce cleaning costs by scrapping school cleaners. Yes and... we'll get the students to clean the two square meters around the area in which they are standing at 2 p.m. every day.
• Reduce the cost of maintaining school grounds by no longer using Council environmental services. Yes and... we'll get students to swap the neat lawns for some self-grown fruits and vegetables, leading to cheaper, better and fresher produce in school meals while also teaching youngsters about crop cycles and basic biology. We could even generate some extra money by selling extra produce to the community, or generate good will by giving it away to those families who occasionally struggle with the bills.
• Reduce the money spent on transporting children to school by stopping taxi runs from remote areas. Yes and... we'll seek out parents to get some regular car sharing started. And we can make a feature of the diverse locations our students live in to create a massive start-of-term expedition to explore the area on foot, and see how close and how far students live from school.
• Improve the quality of service provision by forming a committee. Yes, a committee made up of everyone in the community -- you can call in to local radio and share who you think has made the biggest improvement in your local services (the refuse collector who always replaces the lid on your bin and cleans up rubbish, for example), but the result is given anonymously. That way, everyone in the Council thinks it might be them and adjusts their behavior accordingly.

I don't know the precise figure spent on fruits and vegetables, cleaning and gardening in U.K. schools, but these ideas, applied nationally, could have a much more positive effect on what and how students learn, as well as saving at least a few million.

I'll leave you with a simple one you could get your local school to give up on right now: window cleaning alone is $50,000 a year in one English borough, which nationally would lead to a saving of at least £25 million a year.

If the U.S. did away with schools window cleaning for a year, and instead the community pulled in around it, how many millions could we save?

An excellent point in the Huff Post comments was that, in some 40 years of being a student in or a teacher at high schools in the US, the commenter had never seen a window cleaner. That's the point. It's a hidden expense few of us spot. They're there, every morning when I walk to the train at 6am en route to Newcastle, England. I imagine there there, too, in the wee small hours, making sure your $100m school buildings made of glass and steel reflect the natural light they were designed to. ;-)

Pic: Chris

And 70% have no access to information technology at all.

I'll be in South Africa all week, visiting schools in some of Cape Town's townships tomorrow, and on Wednesday meeting and interviewing the Vice Presidents at Microsoft responsible for making a truly global impact for their company, and for the country's 12million learners' futures in the years to come.

I'll wrap up the week with some of the most innovative technology stories emerging from around the globe as 400 educators converge on the Cape for a jamboree of teaching and learning as South Africa hosts Microsoft Partners in Learning's Worldwide Innovative Education Forum, the first time it's set foot on the continent, and 18 years after Microsoft set up its first office here.

This country does, without doubt, quickly present the digital divide in stark terms. Hotel internet is available at a good rate (about $15 a night), and it's fast. But only 70% of schools have access to any form of technology, and only a third of them have access to the web. Reza Bardien, the education lead at Microsoft South Africa sees the imperative to prepare the 12million learners here for the digital workplaces that await those who make there - everything from the restaurant to the shop where I bought my power adaptor runs of PCs with SQL databases.

But her admission that "it is a daunting task" is understatement to say the least.

Here's what I'm hoping to find: in a rapidly growing city in the global region fastest recovering from the global financial crisis with a population of whom 40% are under 18 years old, we will find creative approaches to engaging learners on their terms, looking at content that really matters to them, learning that is going to help them survive in the world they have around them. It will be a learning that we recognise in some ways - much in the same way as we recognise Chinese food in Chinese restaurants we've never been to before - but it certainly won't be in consistent and unwavering praise of that education heaven, Finland, and it won't be promoting the ideal model of learning as a North American one, the vision which, for the past month of charter school mayhem, assessment and standards groaning and Education Nation soundbites, one might feel is the only system worth discussing on the most common "international education" blogs and magazine sites.

I'm thinking that learning at these kind of extremes, as Charles Leadbeater has shown this past year in his report for Cisco (pdf) and subsequent TED Talk, offers some direction to those of us in Europe, North America and well-off Middle East and Far East countries. Seeing how learning has adapted here to be productive, I hope to be able to better envision what Scotland's learning might look like if we were to strip it back to its students' real, authentic needs, the needs that we might see pulling on us if we seek it hard enough, and not those that are pushed to them by curriculum, strategy and policy.

I can't wait to share my video (on my Vimeo channel and YouTube channel), photographs, tweets (#mseif) and reflections here on the blog and on the Huffington Post, about how learning from the extremes might offer some inspiration for troubled education systems on the other side of the equator.

If you have questions of your own that you'd like me to ask students, teachers or education leaders in the townships, or Microsoft's most senior education VPs, let me know straightaway, and I'll post their answers.